Genre: Comedy
Premise: A couple on the brink of divorce sets off on a romantic getaway to save their marriage, but when they find that they have inexplicably traveled back in time, they decide to team up to stop their younger selves from ever getting married.
About: This script finished Top 20 on last year’s Black List. The writers of the script have been writing together for over a decade. While they have made some shorts and a low-budget feature, this is their first big screenwriting break.
Writers: Mario Kyprianou & Becky Leigh
Details: 111 pages
Feels like a Paul Rudd part!
A little time travel always gives me a case of the cosmic goosebumps. That and a fresh-off-the-grill double-double from In-And-Out. If only those bastards delivered.
It’s rainy here in LA. I’ve got that milky-gray light bleeding through my windows – the kind that makes you want to read. Which is perfect for a guy who runs a website about… reading. :)
Married couple Jon and Ellie Landau have just turned 50 and are heading back to the place where Jon proposed to Ellie – Hawaii. Back then, when they were in their 20s, they were madly in love. But these days, Jon seems to be more turned on by his latest phone alert than he is his wife’s ass.
Ellie feels this, which is why she suggested this vacation. It’s the last chance to rekindle their love. And they get things started right away! Ellie suggests they do a repeat of their initiation into the Mile High Club, only to learn that pulling off sex in the airplane lavatory isn’t as easy, or fun, as it was when you were a horny 23 year old. Let’s just say this attempt ends with the Sky Marshall banging down the door.
Once at the Hawaii airport, the two walk by a play where the head actress, an old woman, appears to put some sort of spell on them. The next thing they know, everybody’s smoking cigarettes and their phones don’t work. They shrug it off and head to the hotel, which looks exactly like it did 30 years ago.
But it isn’t until they spot their younger selves that reality sets in – they’ve been transported back 30 years to the exact week when their young selves came. After a very difficult conversation, Jon and Ellie realize that neither of them are happy and that they probably would’ve had much better lives had they never gotten married to each other.
So they bestow it upon themselves to stop Young Jon from proposing to Young Ellie. And, while they’re at it, they decide to incept their younger selves with a dose of advice. For Young Jon, Jon will make sure he pitches his Amazon-like idea (before there was Amazon) to Future Fest. And for Young Ellie, Ellie will get her to pursue her writing career that she abandoned. To achieve this, they’ll have to befriend their younger selves. Along the way, however, they just might realize that they’re happier than they think.
I like this idea.
It’s like that George Clooney Julia Roberts thing from 2022 but more clever. In that movie, they were trying to stop their kids from getting married. Here, they’re trying to stop themselves. It goes to show that every idea has numerous iterations you can choose from and it’s worth it to explore those options before committing to your original one.
But how about the execution?
When I read a comedy, I need to start laughing immediately. I don’t know if I’ve read a comedy where I didn’t laugh at all in the first 10 pages and then I was laughing a lot from that point on. That’s why it’s so easy to judge comedy scripts quickly. You know if you’re not laughing during those first couple of scenes, the script is a dud.
And I laughed a lot in this opening scene. The writers take a well-known scenario – the mile-high club – and put it under the comedic microscope. The mile-high club sounds good in theory. But how does it work in practice? What happens if the bathroom smells from the last person in there? What about if there’s pee all over the place? How do you situate yourself? Especially if you’re older and less flexible?
And then there’s the comedic contrast – the scene is comparing the past to the present. They did this before, when they were in their 20s. But when you’re in your 20s, you’re not as aware. You don’t think about sanitary issues. You just go in there and do it. But after growing up and understanding how things work, you’re aware of EVERY little potential ickiness. That contrast is what makes the scene funny.
So the script grabbed me right away. And while the laughs don’t come as frequently as in that first scene, there are still some solid LOL moments going forward.
But here’s the thing…
The writers make the mistake of allowing their plot to take precedence over their comedy. I only realized this in the last couple of years: People come to a genre to get THAT GENRE. They come to horror to be scared. They come to action movies to see action. And they come to comedy to laugh. If you’re prioritizing anything else in the script over the thing that the reader showed up for, the reader’s going to be disappointed.
I just talked about this with a writer in a recent script consultation. He’d written a comedy and he had this big giant twist at the end that he really wanted to make work. And I asked him, “When’s the last time you went to a comedy and left excited about a twist ending?” It’s never happened. When you go to a comedy, all you care about is whether you laugh or not.
So with The Getaway, the writers inject two major plotlines – 1) stop Young Jon from proposing to Young Ellie and 2) have Jon get his younger self to create a great pitch at Future Fest so that he becomes rich and successful. That may sound like a good idea since it gives your characters something to do, which keeps them active.
But if the machinations of that plotline are too elaborate, then you’re spending more time explaining the storyline than you are writing funny scenes. You could feel that here. We’re so focused on getting Jon to get his younger self to like him so he can get him to pitch his Amazon idea that finding funny scenes gets left behind.
I’m starting to think you need to approach comedy differently than any other genre. Coming up with a plot that’s amazing, even coming up with amazing character arcs, isn’t as important as writing funny scenes. So when you come up with a comedy concept, brainstorm 50 funny set-piece scenes that best take advantage of your concept (yes, I said “50”), settle on the top 5, and build your story around those five set-pieces (as opposed to outlining a plot and trying to find comedic scenes along the way).
I know this is the better route because the funniest scene in this script is the first scene. And a big reason for that is that the plot hadn’t kicked in yet. So the writers could focus on writing the funniest scene rather than finding a funny scene within their plot.
Once the plot began to control them, then they had to write super-goofy scenes that weren’t that funny and didn’t make sense (riding in a helicopter and getting barfed on by someone from a separate helicopter). That’s what happens when you’re constrained by plot.
I’m going to finish this off by saying one more thing. In certain screenplays, there’s an opportunity to add a work subplot. Like here, we get this whole work subplot where Jon is going to help Young Jon pitch his Amazon idea to Future Fest. This subplot is the definition of an unneeded subplot. How do I know this? Cause I could ask 100 people who’ve read this script if they cared whether Young Jon succeeded with his pitch or not and all 100 would say no.
Again, THAT’S NOT WHY WE’RE COMING TO THIS MOVIE. We don’t care if Jon nails the pitch. You only want to include a work subplot if it has significant importance to the screenplay working. If you removed the subplot in The Getaway, nothing changes. That’s how you know it’s not needed.
The prototypical way to pull a work subplot off is Pretty Woman. They tell you just enough about the work subplot so that the m movie makes sense – it’s the whole reason Richard Gere is in town for a week and why he needs to hire a prostitute – and not one minute more. It’s there to help things make sense and that’s it.
Whereas, here, it’s impeding the actual fun of the script. We’re here to see if these two break their younger selves up. We’re not here to see if they do better at work. That’s nowhere on the poster. I want every screenwriter to internalize this. Only include the story beats that you promised us. Don’t give us ones we don’t care about. And ESPECIALLY don’t give us subplots that force you to make your screenplay more boring.
This script started out strong. These writers have comedic chops. But they focused too much on plotting and, in the process, lost too many opportunities to be funny. I do like that the writers are using the story to try and say something about the choices we make in life and how they can lead us down completely different paths. But that should not have been the priority. The priority should’ve been the comedy.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Relationship scripts work best when the writers lean into the TRUTH. Whenever you give us moments that feel truthful and representative of what happens in real life, we will connect with it. There’s a brilliant little moment early in the script where Jon and Ellie are excited for getting upgraded to the Penthouse suite. They can’t wait to get some dinner at the fancy restaurant downstairs. We then hard cut to them at the dinner table in silence. Why? Because they have nothing to talk about. Why do they have nothing to talk about? Because they’ve spent the last 30 years together! This was the most truthful moment in the whole movie. It captured marriage in just 10 seconds. And it did so because it leaned into truth. Leaning into truth ALWAYS MAKES YOUR SCRIPTS BETTER.
